“You’re shitting me,” Richards said.
“No, man.” He stopped. Richards was suddenly sure that Bradley was weighing what he had said already against a great many more things which he might say. Wondering how much was too much. When the words came again, they came with difficulty. “We’ve been reading. That Free-Vee shit is for empty-heads.”
Richards grunted agreement.
“The gang, you know. Some of the guys are just cruisers, you know? All they’re interested in is honky-stomping on Saturday night. But some of us have been going down to the library since we were twelve or so.”
“They let you in without a card in Boston?”
“No. You can’t get a card unless there’s someone with a guaranteed income of five thousand dollars a year in your family. We got some plump-ass kid an kifed his card. We take turns going. We got a gang suit we wear when we go.” Bradley paused. “You laugh at me and I’ll cut you, man.”
“I’m not laughing.”
“At first we only read sexbooks. Then when Cassie first started getting sick, I got into this pollution stuff. They’ve got all the books on impurity counts and smog levels and nose filters in the reserve section. We got a key made from a wax blank. Man, did you know that everybody in Tokyo had to wear a nose filter by 2012?”
“No.”
“Rich and Dink Moran built a pollution counter. Dink drew the picture out of the book, and they did it from coffee cans and some stuff they boosted out of cars. It’s hid out in an alley. Back in 1978 they had an air pollution scale that went from one to twenty. You understand?”
“Yes.”
“When it got up to twelve, the factories and all the pollution-producing shit had to shut down till the weather changed. It was a federal law until 1987, when the Revised Congress rolled it back.” The shadow on the bed rose up on its elbow. “I bet you know a lot of people with asthma, that right?”
“Sure,” Richards said cautiously. “I’ve got a touch myself. You get
“Temperature inversion,” Bradley said grimly.
”-and lots of people get asthma, sure. The air gets like cough syrup in August and September. But lung cancer-”
“You ain’t talkin about asthma,” Bradley said. “You talkin bout emphysema.”
“Emphysema?” Richards turned the word over in his mind. He could not assign a meaning to it, although the word was faintly familiar.
“All the tissues in your lungs swell up. You heave an heave an heave, but you’re still out of breath. You know a lot of people who get like that?”
Richards thought. He did. He knew a lot of people who had died like that.
“They don’t talk about that one,” Bradley said, as if he had read Richards’s thought. “Now the pollution count in Boston is twenty on a good day. That’s like smoking four packs of cigarettes a day just breathing. On a bad day it gets up as high as forty-two. Old dudes drop dead all over town. Asthma goes on the death certificate. But it’s the air, the air, the air. And they’re pouring it out just as fast as they can, big smokestacks going twenty-four hours a day. The big boys like it that way.
“Those two-hundred-dollar nose filters aren’t worth shit. They’re just two pieces of screen with a little piece of metholated cotton between them. That’s all. The only good ones are from General Atomics. The only ones who can afford them are the big boys. They gave us the Free-Vee to keep us off the streets so we can breathe ourselves to death without making any trouble. How do you like that? The cheapest G-A nose filter on the market goes for six thousand New Dollars. We made one for Stacey for ten bucks from that book. We used an atomic nugget the size of the moon on your fingernail. Got it out of a hearing aid we bought in a hockshop for seven bucks. How do you like that?”
Richards said nothing. He was speechless.
“When Cassie boots off, you think they’ll put cancer on the death certificate? Shit they’ll put asthma. Else somebody might get scared. Somebody might kife a library card and find out lung cancer is up seven hundred percent since 2015.”
“Is that true? Or are you making it up?”
“I read it in a book. Man, they’re killing us. The Free-Vee is killing us. It’s like a magician getting you to watch the cakes falling outta his helper’s blouse while he pulls rabbits out of his pants and puts ’em in his hat.” He paused and then said dreamily:” Sometimes I think that I could blow the whole thing outta the water with ten minutes talk-time on the Free-Vee. Tell em. Show em. Everybody could have a nose filter if the Network wanted em to have em.
“And I’m helping them,” Richards said.
“That ain’t your fault. You got to run.
Killian’s face, and the face of Arthur M. Burns rose up in front of Richards. He wanted to smash them, stomp them, walk on them. Better still, rip out their nose filters and turn them into the street.
“People’s mad,” Bradley said. “They’ve been mad at the honkies for thirty years. All they need is a reason. A reason… one reason…”
Richards drifted off to sleep with the repetition in his ears.
MINUS 062 AND COUNTING
Richards stayed in all day while Bradley was out seeing about the car and arranging with another member of the gang to drive it to Manchester.
Bradley and Stacey came back at six, and Bradley thumbed on the Free-Vee. “All set, man. We go tonight.”
“Now?'
Bradley smiled humorlessly. “Don’t you want to see yourself coast-to-coast?”
Richards discovered he did, and when
Bobby Thompson stared deadpan at the camera from the middle of a brilliant post in a sea of darkness. “Watch,” he said. “This is one of the wolves that walks among you.”
A huge blowup of Richards’s face appeared on the screen. It held for a moment, then dissolved to a second photo of Richards, this time in the John Griffen Springer disguise.
Dissolve back to Thompson, looking grave. “I speak particularly to the people of Boston tonight. Yesterday afternoon, five policemen went to a blazing, agonized death in the basement of the Boston YMCA at the hands of this wolf, who had set a clever, merciless trap. Who is he tonight?
Thompson faded into the first of the two clips which Richards had filmed that morning. Stacey had dropped them in a mailbox on Commonwealth Avenue, across the city. He had let Ma hold the camera in the back bedroom, after he had draped the window and all the furniture.
“All of you watching this,” Richards’s image said slowly. “Not the technicos, not the people in the penthouses-I don’t mean you shits. You people in the Developments and the ghettos and the cheap highrises. You people in the cycle gangs. You people without jobs. You kids getting busted for dope you don’t have and crimes you didn’t commit because the Network wants to make sure you aren’t meeting together and talking together. I want to tell you about a monstrous conspiracy to deprive you of the very breath in y-”
The audio suddenly became a mixture of squeaks, pops, and gargles. A moment later it died altogether. Richards’s mouth was moving, but no sound was coming out.
“We seem to have lost our audio,” Bobby Thompson’s voice came smoothly, “but we don’t need to listen to any more of this murderer’s radical ravings to understand what we’re dealing with, do we?”
“No!” The audience screamed.
“What will you do if you see him on your street?”
“
“
Richards pounded his fist against the tired arm of the only easy chair in the apartment’s kitchen-living room. “Those bastards,” he said helplessly.
“Did you think they’d let you go on the air with it?” Bradley asked mockingly. “Oh no, man. I’m s’prised they let you get away with as much as they did.”
“I didn’t think,” Richards said sickly.
“No, I guess you didn’t,” Bradley said.
The first clip faded into the second. In this one, Richards had asked the people watching to storm the libraries, demand cards, find out the truth. He had read off a list of books dealing with air pollution and water pollution that Bradley had given him.
Richards’s image opened its mouth. “Fuck every one of you,” his image said. The lips seemed to be moving around different words, but how many of the two hundred million people watching were going to notice that? “Fuck all pigs. Fuck the Games Commission. I’m gonna kill every pig I see. I’m gonna-” There was more, enough so that Richards wanted to plug his ears and tun out of the room. He couldn’t tell if it was the voice of a mimic, or a harangue made up of spliced bits of audio tape.
The clip faded to a split-screen of Thompson’s face and the still photo of Richards. “Behold the man,” Thompson said. “The man who would kill. The man who would mobilize an army of malcontents like himself to run riot through your streets, raping and burning and overturning. The man would lie, cheat, kill. He has done all these things.
“Benjamin Richards!” The voice cried out with a cold, commanding Old Testament anger. “Are you watching? If so, you have been paid your ditty blood money. A hundred dollars for each hour- now number fifty-four-that you have remained free. And an extra five hundred dollars. One hundred for each of these five men.”
The faces of young, clear-featured policemen began appearing on the screen. The still had apparently been taken at a Police Academy graduation exercise. They looked fresh, full of sap and hope, heart-breakingly vulnerable. Softly, a single trumpet began to play Taps.
“And these…” Thompson’s voice was now low and hoarse with emotion,”… these were their families.”
Wives, hopefully smiling. Children that had been coaxed to smile into the camera. A lot of children. Richards, cold and sick and nauseated, lowered his head and pressed the back of his hand over his mouth.
Bradley’s hand, warm and muscular, pressed his neck. “Hey, no. No, man. That’s put on. That’s all fake. They were probably a bunch of old harness bulls who-”
“Shut up,” Richards said. “Oh shut up. Just. Please. Shut up.”
“Five hundred dollars,” Thompson was saying, and infinite hate and contempt filled his voice. Richards’s face on the screen again, cold, hard, devoid of all emotion save an expression of bloodlust that seemed chiefly to be in the eyes. “Five police, five wives, nineteen children. It comes to just about seventeen dollars and twenty-five cents for each of the dead, the bereaved, the heartbroken. Oh yes, you work cheap, Ben Richards. Even Judas got thirty pieces of silver, but you don’t even demand that. Somewhere, even now, a mother is telling her little boy that daddy won’t be home ever again because a desperate, greedy man with a gun-”
“Killer!” A woman was sobbing. “Vile, dirty murderer! God will strike you dead!”
“Strike him dead!” The audience over the chant: “Behold the man! He has been paid his blood money-but the man who lives by violence shall die by it. And let every man’s hand be raised against
